Piloting Practice Supervision for the Government Counseling Cadre Lessons and Reflections from Two Pilot Locations in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In 2005, following the recommendations of the Mental Health Policy of 2005 - 2015, a cadre of Counseling Assistants (CAs) were introduced to the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Social Welfare. The Ministry portfolio has been revised many times since then, an important change being the breaking of the Ministry into two, and designated as “Social Services” and “Women’s and Child Affairs”. The two Ministries have a counseling cadre of over four hundred spanning an island wide reach, based in divisional or district secretariats. Counselors attached to the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs and the Ministry of Social Services were introduced with a pilot model of “practice supervision” in 2019. It was The Asia Foundation’s mapping studies (TAF 2018) that led to the pilot project, with its aim of building on the existing peer support mechanisms available for the counselors. Two locations were selected for the pilot project, one from the North Western Province and the second from the Eastern Province. As this paper discusses, this piloted model of practice supervision has evolved significantly from its initial conceptualization: from one on one clinical supervision to a group exercise.